My Opa - WW2 Engineer Officer

[bryang]

I already posted in the First World War section, so this is slightly redundant.

My Mom was born in East Prussia in 1940, and she and her family were forced to flee west to Germany when the Soviet Army advanced westward.  Her father was a Luftwaffe Fallschirmjager who was killed in the Eastern Front in 1943 (I'll post about him separately).  My Oma remarried during the war, not too long after her first husband was killed.  The man I grew up with as my Opa was my Mom's step-father.

 

My Opa was Benno Szogas, born in East Prussia in 1900.  In 1916, as a 16-year old, he volunteered for the war with the Prussian Cavalry.  After the war he received the The Honor Cross of the World War 1914/1918 with Swords (denoting front line service) - otherwise referred to as the "Hindenburg Cross."  This photo of him from the First World War is the only one we have of him from this period.

My Opa never really spoke much of his time in either war, and it wasn't until many years after he passed away that I learned a bit of it from my Mom and Oma.  During one of their visits to us in the U.S., my father and I took Opa to Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, to visit the military museum there.  As we walked among the rows of vintage foreign tanks and armored vehicles, occasionally my Opa would point to one with his cane and remark "I remember when this one came out while I was in Poland in 1940," or "I was in Russia in 1943 when this version came out."  (At the National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, he pointed up to the ceiling at a WW2 German V-1 "Buzz Bomb" and smiled ... said "I was in France and we used to see these things flying overhead all the time.  We never knew what they were.")

 

However, while inside the Aberdeen Proving Grounds museum he stopped at a display of WW1 heavy machine guns and looked for a while.  He slowly explained that he had witnesses his Lieutenant being hit with one of these machine guns during the First World War.  Said that it ripped his chest apart, and that it was - at that time - the most incredible and horrific thing he had ever seen.

 

After the end of the "Great War," he went to college and earned a degree in architecture.  At the start of the Second World War he became a German officer in the Engineer Corps, and served all over the European theaters as a military facilities inspector.  He was witness to some horrible things during the war, and in 1945 was captured by the Soviet Army.  He, and the thousands of other German POWs with him, were force marched westward.  During the course of the 10 to 12 days they were forced to move by foot, they lost many men along the way who were too weak to make it.  They subsequently made it to a larger POW camp, where the prisoners were parsed out to the Allied military for processing: some were handed over to the U.S. military, others to the British, French, or - to great misery - the Soviet military.  Opa told me that they were all set into lines, where their information was taken and they officially became prisoners of one nation or the other.  He told me that when nobody was paying attention he stepped out of one line into another, and was fortunate enough to have landed in American custody!

 

During their forced march, a fellow German prisoner carved a decorative walking stick for my Opa - which I have in my man cave.

 

After the war he worked for the U.S. military, designing and building structures on the American military installations.

 

My Mom brought to my attention that whenever we had family meals my Opa never touched the noodles.  Oma always brought him out a small bowl of boiled potatoes.  Apparently, during his time as a Soviet POW boiled noodles was all they were fed, and he never touched them again.

Posted here are photos of my Opa, Benno Szogas, during the First World War as a 16-year old Prussian Cavalry volunteer, and photos of him during the Second World War.  You'll notice how filled out and healthy he looks in the first photograph, which was taken in 1940 .... and how gaunt and sickly he looks five years later in 1945.

 

Also posted are photos of the few items of his which survived the war - his POW walking stick and ribbon bar, which he is wearing in the 1945 photo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[gwb123]

1 hour ago, bryang said:

a told me that they were all set into lines, where their information was taken and they officially became prisoners of one nation or the other.  He told me that when nobody was paying attention he stepped out of one line in

How lucky for you and him that he survived.  Great story... thank you for sharing.